Round here we feel the first breaths of spring, with tiny fresh green leaves blooming on trees and first flowers of spring sprouting around. And soon enough there will come the time for green, green grass… And for all these reasons – it’s time to go back to land art.

Maya Lin is an American designer and artist who is known for her work in landscape art. One of her widely known (in the world of those interested in “earth art” which comes as another term for this kind of artistic activity) is a massive “Eleven Minute Line”. This squiggly line is 1600 feet long and 12 feet high. And here’s the awesome part: it’s located in a cow pasture in Sweden. The artists was inspired to do this work by the Serpent Mound (c. 1070 AD) which is located in Adams County, Ohio. The Serpent Mound is the largest effigy structure in the United States, and it is thought to have been built by the the Fort Ancient people. (It was originally thought that the structure was built in prehistoric times, but carbon dating of the mound revealed a much later date.)

The artist is from Ohio, and she has always been struck with the story of the Serpent Mound. When Europeans came to America and discovered the Serpent Mound, they concluded that an earlier group of Europeans must have made the structure and then traveled back to the Old World. Basically, these European explorers could not conceive that Native Americans could have built something so complex and monumental. Lin decided add a subtle element of irony with Eleven Minute Line by turning the tables a bit: she brought a design that was inspired from the New World back to the Old World (i.e. Sweden).